


Sanctuary

by Sholio



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Families of Choice, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt/Comfort, Infection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-06 07:06:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16383590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: The Liebermans get a late-night visitor.





	Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



> This also fills my h/c bingo "bullet wounds" square.

It was still something David didn't take for granted, these ordinary nights with his family. There was a time in his life when this was just ... life. Evenings sprawled with Sarah on the couch, laptop at hand and Netflix playing low on the TV, with the kids doing homework at the kitchen table or crashing and clanking as they did the dishes and (from the sound of things) made a bigger mess than they were cleaning up ...

That was his life. And then it wasn't, but he was still a ghost, able to watch but not touch.

He'd never take it for granted again.

And when there was a knock on the door (late, much too late for neighbors to be coming by), he was off the couch in seconds, grabbing the gun from under the cushion as the popcorn bowl went flying.

"David, what?" Sarah was dislodged from where she'd been sleepily draped on his arm. She sat up, blinked, and then scowled at him. "You still have that there? David, we talked about --"

"Shhh." He touched his finger to his lips and reached over to snap off the lamp by the couch, plunging the living room into twilight lit only by the TV and the light streaming in from the kitchen.

The kitchen. The kids --

The knock came again, followed by a hoarse and familiar voice rasping, "David?"

"Frank. Mother of ..." He looked around for a place to put the gun, then decided to keep hold of it just in case Frank came with trouble in tow.

"Mom!" Leo called from the kitchen. "Where does the big casserole dish go?"

"In the cabinet under the junk drawer," Sarah called back, but her eyes were fixed on David as he went to the door.

"It doesn't fit!" 

"You have to turn it sideways!"

Tuning in on the chatter with half an ear, David put his eye to the peephole. He couldn't see anyone out there, just the familiar street at night, serene and quiet at this late hour. He hadn't _imagined_ that, had he?

Wait, was that a hint of movement at the bottom of his field of vision ...?

A kid-sized shadow fell across the block of light coming in through the kitchen doorway, drawing his attention away from the door just in time to see Leo pop up in the doorway, framed against the light, holding the dish in her hands. "I _tried_ , it doesn't -- why are the lights off in here? Eww, Mom, are you and Dad --"

"Leo, go back in the kitchen," David said sharply as he reached to unlock the door. 

He found out an instant later why he hadn't been able to see Frank through the peephole. It was because Frank was slumped against the door. As soon as the door began to swing open, Frank's weight deposited him on David.

David caught him by instinct, the gun dangling from his hand, and looked past him into the street. Nothing. No one. David staggered backward and tried to shut the door with his knee without dropping either Frank or the gun.

"Secure your weapon, dumbass," Frank mumbled into David's shoulder. Most of his weight was leaning on David, and he wasn't a small man.

"Uh ... Sarah, little help here -- Leo, I said go back in the kitchen!"

"Is that Frank?" Leo asked, her eyes wide, clutching the casserole dish in both hands in front of her.

Zach popped up at her side. "Is Frank here?"

By that point Sarah had made it over to the door to give David a hand getting Frank over to the couch. David couldn't tell what the hell was wrong with him. Frank was stumbling, clearly a little bit out of it.

"Frank ... did someone slip you something? Did you _take_ something? Frank? Are people after you? Are they coming here?"

"Could tell you if you'd let me get a word in edgewise," Frank mumbled, so yeah, definitely still Frank.

"What's going on?" Leo crowded into the living room, with Zach clinging to her like a shadow. "Is Frank hurt? Frank, are you okay?"

"Kids," Sarah said in her fiercest no-nonsense mom tone, "go upstairs."

"But Frank --"

"Go!"

This got them scuttling off, to the top of the stairs, at least -- casserole dish and all. By now Frank was sitting on the couch, with David on one side and Sarah on the other. He was still leaning on them like he couldn't even sit up straight, and David could feel the heat coming off of him.

"How'd you get here?" he asked, gripping Frank's jacket-clad arm. Frank had a couple days' scruff of beard, and now that David had a minute to take in more than immediate impressions, he couldn't help noticing that Frank smelled like he'd been sleeping in a sewer and his clothes were caked with ... was that dried blood? He reached over to flick on the light to get a better look. Frank squinted against it, turning his head to take in David with that unnervingly sharp gaze of his, even with his eyes glazed by whatever the hell was wrong with him. 

What he said was: "Secure your _weapon_ , you idiot, there are kids in the house."

David leaned over and dropped the gun into the drawer of the lampstand, shoving it shut. "Am I going to need it? Is anyone coming here? Frank, what the _hell_ is going on."

"Nothing ... it's not ... you aren't in danger." Frank raised a shaking hand to run it over his face. "I think."

"What do you mean, you _think?"_ Sarah demanded, her voice sharp, but David noticed she kept her arm around him and didn't pull away. David could still see the kids' shadows at the top of the stairs, but it wasn't like he could spare a minute to go up there and chase them off to their rooms.

David took in Frank's general appearance with growing worry. Frank was pale, sweaty, and generally looked like shit. With someone else, David might have thought they were fucked up on some kind of drugs or coming off a bender. But that wasn't Frank. Rooming with a guy in a bunker, you got to know a little something about his personal habits. And that was _definitely_ blood, old blood, but still blood. His T-shirt was crusted with it.

"What'd you do to yourself, Frank?"

Frank's voice was ragged. "I just need a place to rest. Get a little sleep. Maybe use your first aid kit."

"Aha, I knew it." David pushed him back against the couch. It was alarming how easy it was to do. "Let's see it."

Frank glanced up the stairs, where the kids' shadows were still visible. "Not here," he said quietly.

David got him on his feet and, with Sarah's assistance, manhandled him into the downstairs bathroom. As David sat him on the closed lid of the toilet, Sarah asked from the doorway, "In or out?"

"Your call, Frank," David told him.

"Don't suppose I could hope _you're_ leaving."

"Hell, no," David said. "She's better at first aid than I am, for what it's worth."

Frank shrugged and closed his eyes.

Sarah edged inside and shut the door, while David got the first-aid kit from under the sink. "Frank?" she said, crouching down beside the toilet. "Show me."

Frank took a breath and started peeling off his jacket, then pulled up his T-shirt. Sarah sucked in a breath. David's first glance took in enough bruising to make it clear someone had worked over Frank pretty good, and his first thought was "internal injuries" until he saw Sarah start prying at something messy and black stuck to Frank's side. Frank gritted his teeth and stayed silent.

"Is that a bandage?" David asked, setting the first-aid kit on the edge of the sink.

"No," Sarah said grimly, struggling to peel the crusted edges off Frank's skin. "It's tape."

"It's _what?"_

"Duct tape." Sarah gave David a helpless look. "He bandaged himself with _duct tape."_

"Stopped the bleeding," Frank mumbled, eyes closed.

"It ... I ..." Sarah trailed off and cursed quietly. "David, _look_ at this. We can't treat this here, Frank. You need a hospital."

"No hospitals," Frank mumbled.

"What the hell, why not?" David had to tear himself away from the hypnotizing mess of Frank's side. It was a mass of blue-black bruising, crusted blood, and general filth. And it didn't smell good. Some of the crusting wasn't blood, it was leaking pus. "You're not off the grid anymore, are you? What the fuck is going on here, Frank?"

"Complicated." Frank drew a deep breath and opened his eyes. "Look, give me the kit. No need to get you two involved. I used to have drop boxes, don't anymore, but --"

"Sit the fuck down." David pushed him back onto the toilet as he started to get up. He was so angry his hands were shaking, and he wasn't even sure who he was angry at: Frank, or Madani or the feds or whoever the hell was pulling Frank's strings now, or just this general shitty world that kept snaring a good man back into a pit he couldn't get out of. "Did you call Curtis?"

"He's out of town. I didn't mean to come here --"

"Shut up. If hospitals are out and Curtis isn't an option, we're going to have to do something about this here, because I'm no EMT, but this looks bad. What _is_ it, anyway? Were you stabbed? Shot?"

"Shot." The word came out on a sigh. "In Chicago, about a day ago."

"You got all the way here from _Chicago?_ Okay, never mind -- Sarah, you know any way to take tape off skin?"

"Rubbing alcohol?" Sarah suggested. She was sitting back on her heels, looking very pale, but calm. This was, after all, a woman who had dealt with Leo breaking two fingers falling off the playground slide and Zach skinning his arm so badly trying to jump his bike over a stack of cardboard boxes that the skin had been hanging down in strips. "There should be a bottle in the kit."

David soaked a cotton ball in alcohol. Damn it, there was a _reason_ why he worked with computers instead of being a nurse or a dentist or a plumber. But he couldn't stop remembering Sarah saying, _David never really got his hands dirty._

_How's this for getting my hands dirty, Frank?_

With Sarah prying at the edge of the tape, David scrubbed at Frank's swollen flesh with the alcohol-soaked swab. Frank sucked in a breath through his teeth but was otherwise silent, gripping the edge of the toilet lid for support. The tape peeled back, taking hair and skin and dried blood with it.

It wasn't as horrifying underneath as David had been afraid of. It was swollen, angry red, and seeping fluids of stomach-turning colors, but David had been prepared for exposed bone or visible loops of half-rotted intestines. If there ever was a guy who would use duct tape to hold in his guts ...

"This is a little outside my medical expertise," Sarah said, with a choked, half-hysterical laugh. "I don't know what to do now. Clean it, I guess?"

Frank visibly braced himself and sat forward, which caused a trickle of dark-colored blood or something worse to soak into the top of his pants. "Need to irrigate it. Get the junk out."

"With what?" David asked. "Water, disinfectant, what?"

"Soap and water first, disinfect after. Hot water if you've got it."

"I'll be back in a sec," Sarah said, and scrambled to her feet. As she opened the bathroom door, David heard her say, "Kids! Bed! What did I say?" and a couple of protesting voices from just a few feet away.

David reached for a washcloth. "How in the hell did it get this bad in just a day?"

"Fell in the river. Not so great with open wounds."

"The _Chicago_ River? Yeah, I'll say." He took a breath, not wanting to think about the East River closing over his head. He still had nightmares about it. In his case, the bullet hadn't even gone in; stopped by his cell phone, it'd left a hell of a bruise and a cracked rib, but there hadn't been anything to get infected. He didn't want to think about how things would've gone if it had. He'd had nowhere to go back then. No one to go to.

He was glad Frank did. Even if he really _actively_ didn't want to be that person right now.

"Blood bothering you?" Frank muttered, and David realized he'd gone quiet.

"I'm getting used to it, being around you," David growled, and Frank gave a faint, choked laugh. David wrung out the cloth and started washing around the wound, trying to be gentle with Frank's bruised ribs. He hadn't even been thinking about it 'til Frank brought it up; now he needed a distraction. "You gonna tell me what you were doing in Chicago?"

"No," Frank said.

Sarah came back with a steaming pan of water. "This is still pretty hot from my tea earlier, and it was boiled. That'll be best, right?"

"Smart lady," Frank murmured.

"It might be easier to do this in the bathtub," Sarah suggested. "Frank, take your pants off." 

This made him balk for the first time. After a round of arguing, Sarah agreed to wait outside while David manhandled Frank into the shower and then turned it on, clothes and all.

"Hey!" Frank yelped, shocked out of his lethargic state for the first time. Water splashed into David's face, and he resigned himself to the fact that he was going to get completely soaked.

"You smell like shit. Literally. Sarah?" he called through the door. "Go get some of my clothes, would you? Anything big and loose."

"I'm gonna look like an asshole wearing your clothes," Frank mumbled, leaning against the side of the shower while David stripped him. David had expected to feel more embarrassed about it than he did, but he'd had plenty of experience at stripping the clothes off feverish or recalcitrant kids, and this didn't feel much different.

"Yeah, yeah, you'll owe me a new sweatshirt after you pop all the seams out of mine. We both know you're grossly overbuilt. Lift your foot."

Water, gray and reddish, swirled down the drain. Frank managed to do most of the scrubbing himself, while David propped him up and got soaked to the skin. At least the shower water was hot.

On the other side of the shower curtain, the bathroom door opened. "Clothes are on the floor," Sarah said. "Since the kids won't go to bed, I've got them changing the sheets on Zach's bed. Frank can sleep there tonight, since we don't have a decent guest room."

"Don't kick your kids out of their beds, for God's sake," Frank stirred himself enough to say.

"Like David said earlier," Sarah said, with a flash of wry humor in her voice, "shut up, Frank." The bathroom door closed.

David got Frank out of the shower, gave his side a good scrub with the hot water followed by a generous application of disinfectant, and rebandaged it before manhandling him into sweats that were markedly too long in some areas and too tight in others. Better than the goddawful rags he'd been wearing, which they probably should just burn.

"You sure nobody's coming after you?" he asked.

"Yeah. I'm sure." Frank didn't volunteer more information.

David decided to take that at face value, hauled Frank's arm over his shoulder, and gave him some assistance up the stairs to Zach's room. The kids were nowhere in sight, but the door to Leo's room was closed and the light was on. At least Sarah had gotten them out from underfoot.

"I don't wanna kick your kid out of his room," Frank muttered as David deposited him on the bed.

"Yeah, well, it's not your house, is it, asshole? I'd rather have you down the hall from me and Sarah, instead of on the couch downstairs or whatever."

"You know, you're a good guy, David," Frank mumbled. "A real good guy."

David glanced at him through the mop of his own damp hair, hanging in his face. "Yeah, I'm a fuckin' saint for putting up with you."

 

***

 

He changed into dry clothes himself and cleaned up the bathroom, double-bagging Frank's biohazard clothes before stuffing them into the trash. Sarah came downstairs as he was sitting at the table, head resting in one hand, the other busy on the keyboard of his laptop.

"Kids in bed?" he asked without looking up.

"Zach's in a sleeping bag on the floor in Leo's room. It's about the best I've been able to do. Frank seems to be resting." She leaned over his shoulder, one arm draped around his neck. "What are you doing?"

"Darknet," David said absently, typing. "Looking for antibiotics."

"You're doing _what_ now?"

"Frank needs antibiotics, and the friend he normally gets them from is not around, so I'm buying drugs on the shadier parts of the internet after midnight because my friend is a _jackass."_

"Don't we still have some left over from when Zach had that ear infection last year?"

"I threw 'em out awhile back," David muttered. "I just double-checked. Of all the times to be a responsible citizen. So ... Internet."

Sarah rested her chin thoughtfully on top of his head. "You can do that on the Internet?"

"Of course you can do that on the Internet. Given a week or two of lead time, I can get perfectly legit antibiotics ... well, legit-ish ... shipped right to our home or the P.O. box of our choice." He scrolled as he talked. "Finding someone local who can sell me same-day, heavy-duty antibiotics is a little iffier, and a lot more expensive. Hence, darknet. Bitcoin. Et cetera."

"And what are you going to do then?"

David sighed heavily. "Go buy drugs from a stranger on the street in the middle of the night, I guess."

 

***

 

He expected to have to argue Sarah into it. What he didn't expect was that it would be futile to try to talk her out of being the getaway driver for his drug buy.

"If something goes wrong, I'm not just leaving you out there. Someone needs to stay back and call the police if there's trouble -- and damn it, David, don't tell me Frank wouldn't want it. He's not going to want you to get shot buying drugs at 2 a.m. for fuck's sake."

"We can't just leave Frank with the kids."

"What, you don't trust Frank now?"

"Of course I trust Frank --" The dead certainty of that declaration stopped him for a minute as the words left his mouth; he managed to push himself past it and went on, "It's that I don't want to put the kids in that situation. He's sick. If there's a medical emergency, they're supposed to deal with it?"

"Look at what they've already dealt with, David. We're only going to be gone for, what, an hour or so?"

And so, very much against his better judgment, he found himself parked in an alley in the family minivan, waiting for a drug dealer while nervously drumming on the dash with his fingers, with Sarah behind the steering wheel, sipping from a thermos of coffee.

 _You can do this,_ he told himself. He noticed that his knee had developed a jiggle and managed to stop it. _You did way crazier things than this with Frank. WAY crazier._

But that was with Frank, who was a one-man army, while Sarah had been safe (or at least, as things turned out, safe-ish) back at home. Not with Sarah sitting beside him in the van, and Frank at home with the kids, where anything could be happening. Since Leo was still awake anyway, they'd left the situation in her capable-but-tween hands, telling her only that her parents needed to go get something to help Frank. David had no idea how much she'd figured out, or how much she was going to figure out. Leo was a sharp kid.

_This can never get back to the kids. What the hell am I doing?_

"David," Sarah whispered, nudging him. She nodded up ahead, where another car was pulling in.

David took a deep breath. "Stay here," he whispered.

"David --"

"You're my backup." He took her face in his hands. "Stay here and back me up. If things go sideways, call the cops and then get the hell out of here."

Sarah laughed faintly. "I can't believe we're doing this."

"Neither can I," David muttered as he got out of the van, "but oddly enough I'm getting used to it."

He shoved his hands in his pockets and approached the car. A window hummed down as he drew near. David clenched his fists in his pockets, told himself that the next thing out of the window wasn't going to be a gun.

It wasn't. "You D-Dog?" a voice with a heavy Eastern European accent asked him. 

"In certain circles."

"Got a package for you."

And that was it. He'd already paid online. He opened the paper bag, nodded in what he hoped was an approved "buying-drugs-after-midnight" kind of way, and tried to look as normal as possible walking back to the van. Frequent glances over his shoulder showed the car reversing out of the other end of the alley and vanishing from sight.

Sarah all but hauled him into the van. "Oh, thank God," she gasped, and kissed him passionately. Pulling back, she said, with a catch in her voice, "I can't believe we just did that."

"Me neither. To be fair, that was more or less exactly what I always thought a late-night drug buy would actually be like."

He opened the paper bag. As Sarah backed out of the alley, he pulled out a ziplog baggie with pills inside. 

"Are we sure these are actually antibiotics?" Sarah asked.

"We're going to have to hope so."

"Does it come with instructions?"

Her skeptical look deepened when David showed her a folded printout that looked like it had been printed off a website page on someone's home inkjet printer. "Seriously?" she said. "Are we really going to give Frank drugs we bought in an alley from some random nutjob on the Internet?"

 

***

 

Frank took two of the pills with a glass of water. "For the record," Sarah said, leaning in the doorway with her arms crossed while David sat next to Frank on the bed, "I think this is a bad idea."

"I've done dumber things," Frank muttered, with a huffed laugh.

"Not actually selling it," Sarah said dryly. She shook her head and came over to kiss David on top of the head. "The kids have finally fallen asleep, wonder of wonders, and I'm going to bed. Frank, help yourself to any of the leftovers in the fridge if you want anything. We'll see you in the morning. Hon, you coming?"

"In a minute," David said.

Sarah smiled and left with a light hand stroked through David's curls.

David sighed and turned a level look on Frank. "Do not make me do that again."

"Didn't make you do it in the first place," Frank muttered, settling himself carefully down on the pillows.

"Thank you, David. You're welcome."

There was another grated-out little laugh, and Frank said, "Thanks. Really. Sorry to put you out. I'll be gone in the morning."

"Oh no you don't. At least let us feed you. Anyway, you can barely walk."

Frank grunted; it was hard to tell if it was assent or not. "Seriously," he said after a minute. "Thanks. I owe you one."

"Yeah," David said. "You do. Not gonna tell me what you're into this time, huh?"

Frank looked up at him with tired, shadowed eyes. "Probably better if you don't know."

 _Dick,_ David thought, and stood up, suddenly fed up with Frank and his dodges and justifications. "But it's fine to show up at my family's house in the middle of the night, on the run and half dead?"

Frank stilled, and his face did ... something. David couldn't help thinking that Frank might have looked like that when he was shot in the first place. "Wasn't thinking," he said, very quietly. "I couldn't think of anywhere else. I shouldn't have ..."

His body gave a heave and now he was sitting up. "Whoa, hey." David caught him and pushed him back down to the bed -- it wasn't very hard, weak as he was. Frank looked up at him with a kind of desperate defiance. "I didn't mean it that way, you dipshit," David said, and sat down heavily on the side of the bed, keeping a hand on Frank's chest just in case he had any intentions of trying to go anywhere else. He could feel Frank's heart beating hard against his palm. "You scared the absolute shit out of us, that's all. And made me need to go commit a felony in the middle of the night, which granted, isn't the first time that's happened in your company."

Frank looked away. "Yeah, well, I'm an asshole. You already know that."

Anger flared in David's chest, hot and bright. "No, you're _not_. You're a shithead with a hero complex who can't seem to grasp that he's got friends and he doesn't have to stay on the run 'til he nearly dies of an infection rather than just picking up the phone and calling us for help. You hear what I'm saying, Frank?"

There was a silence. Frank stared at the wall.

"Frank." David still had his hand on Frank's chest; he gave him a little shake. "Tell me you hear what I'm saying. Tell me you're going to do something other than just bleed out in an alley next time. Tell me you'll call us _before_ your wound goes septic and you end up half dead. You got friends, Frank. Tell me you hear me."

"Yeah, yeah, I hear you," Frank mumbled, staring at the wall.

"Yeah, you better."

"Yeah, I do."

"You're welcome here anytime, you know. Infected bullet wounds or not."

Attuned to reading Frank's micro-expressions as David had become, he didn't miss the tiniest twitch at the corner of Frank's mouth. "Noted," Frank said.

"Sarah wants you to try her world-famous balsamic chicken. She's very hurt that you never accept an invitation."

This time the amused twitch was a little more pronounced. "Well," Frank said, "wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings."

"Leo's been practicing her home repair skills. When you're up and about, she can show you the repair job she did on the broken blinds in Zach's room. She and I are working on a birdhouse to put up in the yard next summer, too."

"Yeah?"

"Well, she'd probably tell you she's building it and I keep breaking it and then she has to fix my work."

Frank snorted a half-laugh. "Smart kid."

"The smartest," David said, hearing the pride in his own voice. "And she thinks the world of you. Both the kids do, and Sarah too. Don't _do_ this to them, you hear me? They've been through enough in the last year. Having you pull out of our lives isn't what any of us want. Neither is having you try to do things on your own 'til you get yourself killed. Understand?"

Frank huffed out a sigh.

" _Frank."_

After a minute, Frank rolled his head to look at David. "If I tell you yes, will you let me up? 'cause I have to take a leak."

David laughed, feeling something unwind in his chest. He transferred his securing grip from Frank's chest to his shoulder, and helped him sit up. Frank's hand came up, settled on David's shoulder, gripped hard.

"You know where the bathroom is," David said. "I'm going to bed with my wife, where I should've been hours ago. And you're gonna be here in the morning. Yeah?"

"Yeah," Frank said, and his hand tightened for a moment. "Yeah, I will be."


End file.
